With the continuous development and improvement in technology, scenes in the movies where robots serving humans and the coexistence of humans and robots is now a dream that may be realized. In recent years, intelligent robotic systems have been widely used in factory automations, hospital automations, museum tour guides, surgical auxiliary systems, space explorations, military applications, domestic services, office services, entertainment purposes and even performed dangerous mission for humans.
As robots are now viewed as the emerging industry for next generation, many organizations have invested a large amount of resources into the research and development of robots, which allowed robots for various purposes to be present to the public continually, such as the robotic pets for accompanying humans and the cleaning robots for cleaning up the house. However, regardless of the structurally complex industrial robots or the relatively simple structured household small robots all require the equipping of sensing elements, for the convenience of robotic activities and prevent robots from bumping into obstacles and become damaged.
High cost and structurally complex robots usually utilize different types of sensors simultaneously for accurate obstacle detection and avoid impacts. For example, the ASIMO robot developed by Honda utilizes visual sensors mounted on the head and ground surface sensors to perform obstacle detection, map out another route to go around the obstacles and arrive at the destination. Moreover, there are also many domestic robots on the market that are affordable to general families, such as the Trilobite vacuum robot manufactured by Electrolux. The Trilobite utilizes ultrasonic sensors to spot and avoid obstacles via sending and receiving ultrasonic signals. However, although visual sensors, ultrasonic sensors and infrared sensors may be effective at spotting and avoiding obstacles, but the disadvantages include the high cost of production and being structurally complicated, also, when the robot moves too fast and the sensors cannot react in time and impacts with the obstacle, the sensors are unable to provide buffer.
Other methods for robots to effectively detect and avoid obstacles include the use of infrared signals or safety magnetic strips for the construction of virtual walls, even though these methods may limit the robots' movements to avoid obstacles, but they are ineffective when it comes to avoiding moving obstacles (such as cats, dogs and humans etc.), and the methods of use are rather inconvenient.
Even though the domestic robots (such as Roomba the vacuum robot and Scooba the ground washing robot developed by iRobot,) sold on the current market usually contain bumpers to lower the damages from impacts, but the bumpers are usually only configured at the front of the robots, therefore when the robot turns around or backs up and impacts with the obstacle with its sides or the back would limit the bumper from providing buffer protection. Moreover, as the bumpers are usually coupled to touch sensors, so if the robot section that contacts with the obstacle is without bumpers, then the sensors would not be activated, thus would require other sensing devices to react to the impact.
Conductive rubber particles and conductive rubber strips are a popular material for electrical wiring, as they have the advantages of being fine, light weight, adaptable, reliable and flexible, and may be securely fixed on to components without soldering to turn on electronic components, and therefore widely used in remote controls, mobile phones, notebooks, portable music players and other electronic products.
Due to the above, the present invention provides a bumper structure for a moving device (such as a robot) to change directions when bumping into an obstacle, with the effects of providing buffer during impacts, can be implemented with low cost and may be wrapped around the moving device to provide a 360° buffer protection.